Rackspace Training For OpenStack Heads To MIT

We’re continuing to roll out our training for OpenStack[1], and this week we launched training at colleges and universities; and we could think of no better place to start than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [2]

As part of MIT’s 2013 Independent Activities Period[3], more than 20 students will receive a 12-hour introduction to OpenStack from the Rackspace training for OpenStack team.

While delivering training at MIT was a first for the team, it wasn’t the first time OpenStack has been used at MIT –the school’s infrastructure group runs an OpenStack deployment for its CSAIL[4] (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab).

The training session usually runs four days — for a total of 32 hours — but to fit the MIT IAP schedule, the class was condensed to just 12 hours with some pre-work for students.

Several students in the class are MIT scientific researchers, who are looking for easier and faster ways to harness compute power. They hope OpenStack can relieve the wait for resources they sometimes experience with dedicated hardware or large national computing centers.

The Rackspace class features a “cloud in a box” lab made up of 24 Dell laptops that are truly commodity hardware; nothing much beyond what anyone could buy at the neighborhood big box store. Each student gets his own OpenStack node which makes the class very hands-on.

We’ll be following the class each day this week. This video offers a glimpse of the first night of OpenStack training, highlighting the training team’s arrival on campus and the introduction to OpenStack.

Looking for a primer on OpenStack, check out OpenStack 101[5], a six-minute video crash course on what OpenStack is and who uses it.